Michael Broek

The Logic of You 8

The irony of Yoo didn’t evade him – the inverse universe of the I. When his wife had said, You, she meant, I feel. When he had said, You, he meant, I wish I hadn’t. That equation, as he tried to repair the hole he had kicked in the wall of just missing flush. He had plastered & sanded, followed the directions. Tried to cover the jagged oval like a miniature crab nebula emitting nervous energy into space, gammas & alphas & dark strings with a square. Chinese & Arab astronomers recorded an explosion in the sky in 1054. Seven hundred years later John Bevis recorded the Crab at Stokes Newington in 1731, also why no flowers would grow in his garden. The star had vanished , its pulsar winds set aspin. Charles Messier noted the Crab crawling along Rue des Mathurins, Paris in Connoissance des Temps in 1784, which meant, literally, “knowledge of time.” At Birr Castle, Ireland, in 1840 where the Leviathan gathered more universal light than any mirror had before, the Crab was discovered again. In the First World War of their marriage, the Leviathan, its copper and tin was transformed into guns. Her, You, a hole blasted into the dark matter of his living room wall, black & infinite a structure of time.